M. Henri Day wrote:Not to belabour the point, but a pm I attempted to send to our excellent Dr Goodword has been languishing in my outbox for nearly three and a half days....

Henri

Is it still in your outbox? Dr. Goodword might not have read it yet, it could stick there until he reads it. As far as I know, there's no "delivery" mechanism per se - pretty much all the messages go straight into the database/the recipient's outbox. I could be wrong, however.

Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time. - Alan Perlis

No, the message was sent to Dr Goodward (and, as always, a gracious reply received) shortly after I posted the above. But the impression I get is that pm's are not sent directly to the intended recipients ; rather, it would seem that they first are transmitted to one's outbox and thereafter, by some mechanism I do not understand, sent to their intended destinations, at which time a copy is posted to the «sent» box. It is interesting to note that pm's in the outbox cannot be saved ; that operation can only be performed after they have arrived in the «sent» box. Can something be done to speed this process up ?...

While on the subject of pm's, would it be possible to increase the capacity of the «save» box ? Mine contains only 27 postings, but is more than half full - or as optimists would perhaps put it, half empty....

Perhaps the messages in one's private message OUTBOX remain there until that person closes his session/browser, at which point the system then transmits the message and it is instantly moved to the SENTBOX...?

I sent a test message to myself. After the 'Your message has been sent' window refreshed back to the Inbox view, my test message was already in my list of messages -- so it had already been delivered. HOWEVER, I did not open the message, but instead went to my Outbox, and as I expected, my message was, indeed, still in my Outbox.

I then proceeded to delete the test message, and after confirming the deletion, the window refreshed back to my original message list -- the test message was gone from my Inbox.

I ran the same test, but this time I opened the message in my Inbox, and upon checking the OUTBOX, my test message was no longer in that list.

In other words, as Andrew stated, the message appears in your Outbox until the recipient OPENS the message in his/her Inbox to view it.

Tim, I repeated your test and got the same results. Thus, it certainly does seem to be the case that a pm stays in the sender's outbox until the recipient opens it. Only when this has been done is it forwarded to the sent box. The problem with this arrangement is that messages in the outbox cannot be saved, something the sender might wish to do even before recipients open them (if, indeed, they chose to do so - one never knows !). Perhaps the «save» function could be tweaked a bit ?...